 Lye Free Soap Recipe!
If you've landed on this page looking for a Lye-free soap recipe, then let us help you to stop your endless searching. No, we haven't any lye free soap formulas here, nor will you find any anywhere else. You see, there are some basic ingredients that go into making soap, and they are lye and fat. Lye + Fat = Soap. It's as simple as that really. Lye soap making without lye isn’t soap because ALL SOAPS ARE MADE WITH LYE!
You may be wondering how making organic soap is achieved if there is no such thing as lye free soap? Well, to be honest, soap without lye is not soap at all, so even organic soaps have to include lye in the cooking process. But here's something you might want to consider about lye soap making; No finished soap should contain lye. During the soap making process, the soap product is produced by reacting lye with oils (fats). The lye is consumed by this reaction and so none should remain in the finished product. So if you're now happy and convinced about the fact that there is no lye free soap making, perhaps your next biggest question is where to buy lye?
Soap making is not really a common hobby to be honest, and most folks would sooner it be done by someone else so that they can chose and purchase products with ease in the high street, be they hard soaps, or the now popular soft soaps found in handy dispensers. But lye soap making (not lye free soap making), does still have a dedicated following, and especially now that the tree-huggers in society are looking for ways of making organic soaps at home.
Putting aside lye free soap for a moment, have you ever wondered what soap is exactly? Like most products produced for the benefit of we humans, someone must have invented it. So when was that and just how long have we been using soap as a substance to cleanse our bodies? Today, all we want to know is where to buy lye, but how did someone discover lye to begin with as an essential ingredient in what is now known as lye soap making?
Soap is the word we use to describe a number of different compounds that all basically act in the same way. They are all cleaning compounds that function by a chemical process called ‘emulsification’.
Fats, oils, and greases are very difficult to clean using just water since these substances don’t mix well with the liquid. Soaps are all chemically significant because they mix well with both water and fat based compounds. A portion of any soap chemical is ‘hydrophilic’, or ‘water loving’, and allows it to dissolve freely in water. The other half of soap compounds, however, is ‘hydrophobic’. This part of the soap allows it to mix with fats and oils, since they are also hydrophobic. Most soaps today use a formula involving lye, a caustic solution of potassium hydroxide, and are commonly called ‘lye soaps’.
When water with soap dissolved in it comes in contact with a fat based compound, the hydrophobic portion of the soap molecule attaches to the fat. The fat soon becomes completely covered in soap molecules and then breaks apart due to the soaps mutual attraction to the water molecules flowing around it. On a side note, this emulsification process is actually the same way we digest fat that we eat, with the liver made substance ‘bile’ acting as the ‘soap’. Bacteria, dirt, and other undesirable contaminants to our skin tend to get trapped in layers of oil than won’t readily come off with out using soap.
There are records of soap use that date as far back as ancient Babylon in the third millennium BC. Strangely, the Romans were not known to use soap. Though the word ‘soap’ first appears in a text written by the famous Roman scholar ‘Pliny the Elder’, he refers to it as a kind of ancient hair gel in use in some regions of the time, not for its detergent qualities.
Lye soap of the kind we know today was invented by the Arabs well after the fall of the Roman Empire, in either the 6th or 7th centuries AD. The formula is the same basic formula we still use today. Generally, lye soaps are made by mixing animal fats with lye. Because lye is such a caustic chemical, this can be a dangerous process, but the resulting lye soap is of course harmless. Several alternative fats can be used to make a lye soap, many people make their own soaps at home using olive oil. Soap made with olive oil is sometimes called Castile soap, after the region of Spain in which it first became popular. If you want to know how to make homemade soap then do a search on Google or check back here in a few weeks time as we should have a recipe or two by then.
We certainly do love our soaps in the West. We love their fragrance, the way they feel, and the way in which they cleanse our skin and make us smell. Making Lye Soap is perhaps a strange an unnecessary thing to do given the cheap price of high street soaps, but soap is one phenomenon that we can’t get enough of!
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